Justice, religion, and healing: a Cambodian perspective.
Rituals and other religious activities constitute resources for healing after traumatic stress. Yet these are not the only links between religion and mental survival. In a recent PhD project, resilient survivors of the Khmer rouge were asked “the salutogenetic question” (Antonovsky, 1987): not, why were they sick, but why were they healthy?
Findings suggested that successful survivors used religion as a secure ‘knowledge’ of how to act and how to explain the traumatic events of the Cambodian holocaust. A nomos, the internalised cognitive and normative edifice used by the individual in his own subjective ordering of experience, was the key to survival and post-traumatic recovery.
This paper focuses on how accessing this ‘knowledge’ may be used as a strategy to promote healing in the psychological and medical care of post-conflict survivors from cultures where religions are fundamentally constitutive. Finally it examines how ‘justice’ may be viewed from this perspective.
